Shield of Winter

Chapter 31

The E designation has no official subdesignations. That doesn’t mean those subdesignations don’t exist.

Excerpted from The Mysterious E Designation: Empathic Gifts & Shadows by Alice Eldridge

MUCH AS IVY wished she could keep Eben with her, she was in no position to offer him a home. For now, the boy was better off with the paternal uncle who was his new legal guardian. “Once we’ve beaten this,” she told him as they walked out of the cabin the next morning, “I want you to come back, undertake specialized training.”

The lanky teenager’s return gaze held a new maturity. “What shall I do for now?”

“Shield yourself as deeply as you can.” According to Kaleb Krychek, the NetMind was protecting empathic minds from discovery—except for those such as Ivy who’d gone fully active—but no one knew if and when the neosentience’s ability to do so might be compromised by the infection. “If you feel any kind of a threat, psychic or physical, contact me or Vasic, and we’ll come get you.”

“I will.” Hugging her, he bent to pet Rabbit. “I hope you figure this out, Ivy.”

“Me, too,” she whispered.

Abbot waited until the teen had waved good-bye before teleporting him to his new home. Hoping he’d be safe, Ivy crossed the snow to the gathered knot of Es in the clearing in front of the cabins. She’d already told them her decision and the reason why, as well as the fact she could very well be wrong.

Now, Brigitte turned to her, a thick yellow scarf wrapped around her neck. “Our Arrows will go with us if we decide to follow your path?”

“Yes.” As Vasic had pointed out, the threats they’d face wouldn’t only come from the crawling rot of the infection.

“I think you’re wrong in one sense,” Chang said, eyebrows drawn together above narrowed eyes. “You should have an empathic partner, at least so you can test different methods.”

Ivy hadn’t wanted to pressure anyone by making that request, but now Jaya slipped her arm through Ivy’s. “I planned to ask you if you’d mind some company.” On the telepathic level, she added, Abbot and I both believe in your theory.

Ivy squeezed her friend’s hand.

“I’m afraid,” Concetta whispered, her amber eyes miserable in her heart-shaped face. “I wake up with nightmares of the oily, ugly evil, my breath choking in my throat.”

“I don’t think we can eliminate our awareness of the darkness.” Ivy, too, had woken up slick with sweat more than once, her heart pounding so hard it was all she could hear.

“Yes, we can.” Concetta wrapped her arms around herself, her wool coat a pale beige. “If we go back to sleep, go back to being normal!”

Beside her, Isaiah shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “You can do that.” His voice was toneless, his jaw rigid. “But it’s not only the nightmares you’d be losing.”

Face crumpling, Concetta raced off toward her cabin.

Jaya glanced after the other woman, a helpless expression on her face. “Shall I . . . ?”

“Leave it.” Tone harsh, Isaiah resolutely didn’t turn to look at where Concetta had gone. “We have to each make this decision on our own. If the Council and our families hadn’t screwed us up as children, we wouldn’t need to, but the bastards did fuck us up. I, for one, don’t intend to be a coward hiding out in a cabin in the woods.”

Ivy thought of the Eldridge book that Sascha had shared with the group. In the past, while some empaths had helped those with terrible mental illnesses, others had worked as school counselors or even in corporate offices. Es covered as wide a spectrum as any other designation.

It appeared Penn’s mind had tracked the same path, because the big man stared at Isaiah, his accent heavy as he said, “Not everyone’s meant to be a soldier. Doesn’t mean what they have to offer isn’t of value.”

Shoulders tense, Isaiah didn’t respond, but left a minute later. He returned with his hand holding Concetta’s five minutes after that. In the end, the decision to leave the compound to head into infected zones was unanimous. It didn’t take much longer to confirm partnerships. Penn ended up with Isaiah and Concetta, since Concetta was obviously not built to handle the infection directly. She’d instead focus on the victims, see if she could help ease their trauma.

“This’ll be our last night together then,” Chang said, after everything was settled. “I suggest we have dinner together. All of us, empaths and Arrows.”

That was what they did, bringing extra chairs into the Arrow cabin. The Arrows were quiet, but no longer silent as they’d been at the start, all of them adding their thoughts to the intense discussion about possible tactics.

The Arrows’ security responsibilities meant they rotated in and out, and whenever Vasic was outside, Ivy missed him until she couldn’t breathe. Jaya, Abbot, you, and I are to be stationed in New York, she told him telepathically. One of the others has family in Alaska and requested Anchorage. That had originally been Ivy’s intended destination.

I’ll arrange apartments near the street that suffered the outbreak today.

Thank you.

It’s my job, Ivy. There’s no need to thank me.

Her nails pricked her palms. Is that all I am to you? A job?

Why would you ask me a question to which you already know the answer?

She thought of his arms around her, of the tender way he had of cradling the back of her head . . . and she allowed herself to think of the ugly thing she’d never forgotten. That the man who held her with such care had a ticking time bomb on his arm.

Ivy?

I’m mad at you, she said, panic and nausea twisting inside her. Be quiet.

When he rotated inside a half hour later, he attempted to catch her eye. Scared for and angry with him for having made a decision that could end them before they began, she kept her gaze stubbornly on the others. When the talk finally faded, she got up and headed to her cabin, Rabbit bounding up ahead and Vasic a silent shadow by her side.

“Don’t be silly,” she snapped when he went to take a watch position on the porch. “It’s snowing.” The sharp words dripped crimson with her own heartsblood, the sheer unfairness of the blade hanging over Vasic’s neck making her want to rage and scream and throw things in useless fury.

He came into the kitchen, held up the wall while she stomped around packing up her belongings. It didn’t take long, and then she could no longer avoid looking at the horrible thing on his arm, the thing that was killing him.

“If I can’t undo this, will you be angry with me till the end?”

The quiet question broke her. “No,” she whispered, throat raw. “I just need to be angry first.” Before she sank into him, so deep that he’d leave a tattoo of himself on her cells, the memory one that would never fade.

“Would you like to go somewhere?”

She jerked up her head from where she was writing his name over and over on the counter with a fingertip. “What?”

“I’m off shift for the next six hours.”

“Yes.” Trying to think past the storm of anger and agony inside her, she looked down at her jeans and favorite white cowl-neck sweater, having taken off his jacket when she’d entered the cabin. “Am I dressed okay?”

“Yes.” He stepped closer. “Would you like to bring Rabbit?”

God, how could this incredible man ever have thought himself so beyond redemption that he’d volunteered for an experiment that was a death sentence? Stifling the words because she didn’t want to fight with him anymore, she said, “He’d enjoy the adventure.” Bending down, she gathered her pet in her arms. “Ready.”

“Close your eyes.” A pause, his fingers rising to just barely graze her hair. “Please.”

Charmed and heartbroken, she did so, felt the slight psychic shimmer of a teleport. When Vasic murmured, “Open,” she lifted her lashes to find herself atop a sand dune, amidst a stunning sea of rolling sands spotlit by a huge silver moon.

A gasp escaped her, pure wonder in her blood. She’d never been anywhere near a desert except for those fleeting instants the previous night when Vasic had lost control. “It’s cold!” she said as Rabbit jumped out of her arms.

“Temperatures drop steeply at night here.”

Utterly mesmerized, she sat down on the fine, fine sand, while Rabbit sniffed suspiciously at the unfamiliar environment before racing down the dune. “I’ve never seen such an enormous moon.” She could almost reach out and touch it, it sat so heavily in the sky.

Sitting down beside her, Vasic said, “I come here to think.”

“I understand.” It was peaceful without being barren. The silica glittered under the moonlight, a gentle breeze played with the rare clumps of grasses she could see in the distance, and the dunes threw smudged moon shadows that turned the landscape into an oil painting. “Thank you for showing me,” she said, watching Rabbit chase imaginary prey below them.

They sat in silence for several minutes. It wasn’t a comfortable silence, the haunting beauty of the night not enough to make Ivy forget what Vasic had done. It was stupid to feel betrayed, but she did. He should’ve known, should’ve waited for her to find him, cried a stubborn, irrational part of her.

“Are you still angry?”

Her anger crumbled. Leaning her head against his arm, she said, “I’m sorry for taking out my temper on you.”

Vasic put his gauntleted arm around her shoulders. “I wish I’d met you ten years ago.”

His words destroyed her, they carried such loss, such tightly held pain. What, she thought with a stab of fury, had her strong, wounded, beautiful man been forced to do in those ten years? She didn’t ask, unwilling to contaminate his haven with such terrible memories. “Look,” she said instead, “Rabbit’s trying to climb up the dune.” Her poor little dog kept sliding down, unable to figure out how to make the sand behave.

Face set in increasingly stubborn lines, Rabbit continued to try in an adorable display of will. “Come on,” she said to her pet, “you can do it. You can do it, Rabbit.”

And then he was scrambling up, slowly but surely. She slapped Vasic lightly on the chest. “You’re helping him.”

“It seems only fair since I brought him here.”

Rabbit flopped down beside them seconds later, his eyes closed and tail wagging slowly as he rested from his labors. Ivy went to pet him when Vasic stood, slightly unbalancing her. She braced her hand on the sand, looked up. “Do we have to leave?”

He shook his head and came back down . . . except this time, he sat behind her, his legs on either side of her own and his chest a hard wall at her back. Wrapping his arms around her, he held her close. She didn’t shy away from the gauntlet; the malfunctioning piece of technology was part of Vasic and as angry as it made her, never would she reject him in any way.

At this second, however, her focus wasn’t on the hardware. Neither was it on the stunning landscape. Not with her body deliciously imprisoned by the muscled heat of his. Pulse racing as a fine sheen of perspiration broke out over her skin, she whispered, “Vasic.”

His breath was hot against her neck as he leaned down . . . and then she felt his lips brushing over the place where her pulse jumped. Whimpering, she gripped at his thighs. The muscles in his forearm tightened in response, pushing up her breasts, but he didn’t intensify the intimacy, didn’t reach up to squeeze her needy flesh, tug at her nipples.

No, Vasic was patient. Excruciatingly patient. He explored her with an erotic attention to detail that made her squirm. But no matter how she begged and pleaded, he wouldn’t allow her to turn. “I’ll lose it,” he said bluntly. “Let me be selfish.”

“If this is you being selfish,” she gasped, clenching her thighs together in a vain effort to ease the ache within, “I’ll never survive your version of generous.”

Ivy—another kiss—let me.

That was when Ivy realized she had a serious Achilles’ heel when it came to negotiating with a certain Arrow. She couldn’t say no to him. Shivering at the wetness as he opened his mouth as if tasting her, she melted into him and let him be as selfish as he wanted.

VASIC met Aden at dawn the next morning, deep in the woods surrounding the cabins. “The gauntlet,” he said, “I need you to help me run down any possible solution, no matter how dangerous.”

Aden, who’d opposed the procedure from the start, said, “I’ve been keeping up to date with the science since the day you volunteered. Edgard and the biofusion team have pushed their limits and are now at a dead end. The only person who might have an answer is the original inventor of the concept, but—”

“All indications are that Samuel Rain is dead.” Vasic had attempted to ’port to the brilliant engineer, using his face as a lock, to no avail. The only other thing that could explain the ’port failure was a complex telepathic shield. However, given the fact that Samuel Rain had literally disappeared off the face of the planet, leaving projects half-finished when he was known to be meticulous and obsessive about his work, that was a slim possibility at best.

Now, his partner met his gaze. “After giving you the last report,” Aden said, “Edgard received the cross-sectional scans of several components he hadn’t considered a priority because they were designed to last a lifetime. The entire biofusion team worked through the night to recheck that data—he sent me the results twenty minutes ago.”

The fact Edgard Bashir had wanted Aden to deliver the news told Vasic it would be bad even before his partner telepathed him the short report. According to it, the team had found severe and inexplicable degradation in a number of tiny internal components that interfaced the gauntlet computronics with his brain. Those pieces were why this was biofusion; the connections allowed him to control the gauntlet with a thought, turning it from a grafted tool to simply another part of his body.

When the listed components fail, read the report, it will ignite a power surge directly into his cerebral cortex. His chance of survival is zero. Should no other components degrade in the meantime, the gauntlet will cause the subject to suffer a fatal neurological event in eight weeks, factoring in a margin of error of one week on either side.

Vasic stared out at the dawn as a cold, hard anger smashed through the numbness that only his emotions for Ivy had been able to penetrate thus far. ’Porting to the desert with Aden, he set it free in a roaring telekinetic storm that sucked the sand into violent tornados that howled across the landscape as far as the eye could see. If his mind attempted to tell him that emotion was pain, he didn’t hear it, didn’t feel it, the anger a consuming rage.

He didn’t know how long it lasted, but when the wind fell, the landscape was no longer the same one Rabbit had played across only hours before, the dunes left in an unfamiliar pattern. Pulse slamming in his throat and eyes and mouth gritty with the fine sand, Vasic let the hot desert sun beat down on him and knew he’d keep fighting, keep searching for an answer. Never would he give up.

But . . . he wouldn’t tell Ivy the truth of his current projected life span. He’d go against Judd’s advice and keep a secret. He didn’t want her sad and angry again, was thirsty for her smile, her soft sighs as she turned to honey under his touch. Even knowing what he was, what he’d done, she’d chosen him, allowed him to put his hands on her.

“Will you make sure she’s safe after I’m gone?” Her heart would break; his loyal, beautiful Ivy who’d mourn for him.

Aden, his hair dusty from the sandstorm and his uniform the same, shot Vasic a look that was an answer in itself. The question didn’t need to be asked.

“I won’t forgive you,” his partner said into the quiet. “Don’t ask it.”

Vasic accepted that. In volunteering for the gauntlet, he’d broken the trust formed between them when they’d been two scared boys who had no one else to turn to, a trust of brotherhood that said they’d fight together to the end. “I was weak,” he said. “I’ll be strong now.”

Aden didn’t look at him. “If you were weak, you’d have killed yourself years ago. It’s your strength that doomed you—and your loyalty.” Aden clenched his jaw so tight, the bone pushed white against his skin. “Take your chance at happiness, Vasic. Be with Ivy. It’s little enough recompense for the lives you’ve saved.”

“And the lives I’ve taken?”

“You gave yourself a death sentence.”